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Cloudy with a chance of ... pine cones?

Here is a picture of the wheelchair ramp on the front of the building. Thanks to a particularly unstable weather cell in our area we had violent winds this morning. While working with a small group of four year old children we heard THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK outside the building and I immediately thought that I was hearing hail. When you are an adult it is sometimes reflexive to think about boring things like repair bills for damage - the noise was extremely LOUD and I was envisioning the dents all over the roof and hood of my car!

Thankfully I don't work in the world of adults and so the self pity over potential repair bills didn't last long. The children were curious so we all ran to the window and they were amazed at what we all saw. "OH MY GOODNESS IT IS RAINING PINE CONES!!"

The contextual world of children is currently rich with movie metaphors for odd rain events and so it all made very perfect sense to them. The kids were very excited to return to our pre-writing activity and modify the pictures they were working on by adding "pine cone rain." It was grand fun this morning!

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